Abbreviations

When writing, it is often helpful to abbreviate certain terms.  The table below contains a list of some standard abbreviations often used in biology.

If an item does not appear on this list, but you wish to abbreviate it, you can write the full name out and put the abbreviation in parentheses so that the reader can reference what you are indicating by your abbreviation.

Example  However, biological membranes may also adopt highly curved conformations such as in tubules of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), small vesicles, edges of ER sheets or Golgi stacks, and fusion stalks. Wang et al. 2013

Units of Measure

When reporting numeric data, include an abbreviated version of the metric units. Put a space between the number and the unit.

Student example

Average width of the stream was 5.6 m.

Professional example

For example, mean corolla diameter ranged from 4.2 ± 0.9 mm (mean ± SD) in female flowers in the southern Baja California dimorphic population IHC, to over twice that width (9.5 ± 0.7 mm) in the cosexual central Mexico population LL.  (Kamath et al. 2017)

 Common abbreviations and units of measure

Unit

Abbreviation

Definition

Time

sec

seconds

min

minutes

hr

hours

Length

µm

micrometer

mm

millimeter

cm

centimeter

m

meter

km

kilometer

Mass

g

Grams

mg

Milligrams (10-3 g)

µg

Micrograms (10-6 g)

Volume

L

Liter

mL

Milliliter (10-3)

µL

Microliter (10-6)

Nucleotide length

bp

Base pairs

Kb

Kilobase pairs

Mb

Megabase pairs

Molecular biology

A, T, G, C, U

Adenine, Thymidine, Guanine, Cytosine, Uracil

DNA

Deoxyribonucleic acid

RNA

Ribonucleic acid

dNTP

Deoxyribonucleotide triphosphate

NAD

Nicotinamine adenine dinucleotide

TRIS

Tris(hydroxyamino)methane

UV

Ultraviolet light